While the depleted ranks of the professorial body are thus regularly supplied, it is clear that more services remain available in the Order at large, than the single purpose of education would at any time require. But this only serves the wider scope which the Society has in view, much wider than education taken alone. And Ignatius makes mention of this expressly when he says, that the Scholastic students "may never come to profess the learning which they have acquired"; still "they are to consider that labor of studies as a work of great merit in the sight of God."[73] So much for the widest and highest intellectual objects aimed at in these studies. Looking down now to its lowest limit, we perceive that education, as imparted by the Society to the external world, is to begin not below "the rudiments of grammar, in which boys must already be versed; they must know how to read and write; nor is any allowance to be made in favor of any one, whatever be his condition of life; but those who press these petitions upon us are to be answered, that we are not permitted" to teach the elements. This is the ordinance of Aquaviva, in 1592, and he simply refers to the Constitution.[74] He also notes, in the same document, that the new _Ratio Studiorum_ elevates every grade, as it stood at that date, one year higher than it had been before. The document is from the German archives. Pachtler observes that most of the Latin schools, particularly in Protestant Germany, took children up from the alphabet.[75] The effect of the Jesuit system was that of a constant upward trend to what was higher, more systematic, and complete. This brings us to the question of method. Here a number of elements occur, some of them essential, many of them subordinate. These latter, at least, were the products of ingenuity and industry on the part of the teaching body, and were productive of industry and life on the part of scholars. To illustrate the whole matter, I will refer to authors who were addressing the world, soon after the Society had taken its stand as an educational power, and when its institutions were conspicuous to the eyes of all. First comes classification, which was an essential feature of the Jesuit system. Ribadeneira, the intimate friend of Ignatius, when writing the life of Loyola, in the year 1584, and describing the work of the Order, now forty-fours years old, observes: "Elsewhere one Professor has many grades of scholars before him; he addresses himself at one and the same time to scholars who are at the bottom, midway, and at the top; and he can scarcely meet the demands of each. But, in the Society, we distinguish one rank of scholars from another, dividing them into their own classes and orders; and separate Professors are placed over each."[76]